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On top of everything else, Mark Penn might have taken away Hillary Clinton's NAFTA stick.

Until he quit Sunday, Mr. Penn was Ms. Clinton's chief campaign strategist, a brilliant but tempestuous adviser to whom the New York senator was deeply loyal.

But Mr. Penn also runs a lobbying firm, and on Friday The Wall Street Journal reported that he had met with Colombian officials, who were his clients, to plot strategy for getting a Colombia-U.S. free-trade agreement through Congress.

Ms. Clinton strongly opposes that agreement. Exit chief strategist.

Mr. Penn's departure will force a realignment of roles and responsibilities within the senior ranks of Ms. Clinton's organization at a critical period of her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The Pennsylvania primary is only two weeks away, and things are not going well.

The state should be tailor-made for her: full of older and working-class voters, her core constituency.

But her opponent, Barack Obama, has been working Pennsylvania hard.

He spent six days last week touring the state by bus, swapping his soaring cadences for humbler rhetoric geared to working stiffs.

The tour, along with an advertising campaign that has heavily outspent Ms. Clinton's - some estimates put it as high as 5 to 1 - has had an effect.

In mid-March, Ms. Clinton led Mr. Obama by 15 points. Today, the RealClearPolitics compendium has her lead down to seven points.

If the gap remains that narrow, the Clinton campaign has little hope of eating into Mr. Obama's lead in pledged delegates, even if she does win the popular vote on April 22.

She must get her lead back into double digits. But Mr. Penn might have just made that impossible.

In the last contest involving a big, rusting industrial state, Ohio, Ms. Clinton's campaign profited from a major Obama misstep involving NAFTA.

Mr. Obama's principal economic adviser reportedly assured Canadian diplomats that the Illinois senator's vows to rewrite or rip up the continental trade agreement should be looked upon more as campaign fodder than settled policy.

Ms. Clinton accused Mr. Obama of being untrustworthy when it came to protecting workers' jobs from foreign competition.

It worked in Ohio and should work in Pennsylvania as well.

Except what happened to Mr. Obama has now happened to Ms. Clinton, only worse.

It's one thing to have an academic who advises you on economic policy misspeaking around some Canadian diplomats.

It's something else entirely for your most senior strategist to be actively conspiring to push a trade agreement through Congress that you publicly oppose.

Ms. Clinton may have no choice but to silence her criticism of Mr. Obama's trade trustworthiness.

Stories detailing fresh disasters in Clinton-land have become tiresome but hard to avoid.

Mr. Obama continues to trounce her in fundraising. In March, he pulled in $40-million in donations, compared with her $20-million.

At that rate, not only will she be unable to match him in organizational and advertising muscle in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Indiana, she may have trouble financing the remaining contests in May and early June.

Donors can count. If Ms. Clinton wins Pennsylvania only narrowly, if she loses in North Carolina (where Mr. Obama currently enjoys an 18-point lead), and if Indiana is essentially a wash, then she will have run out of states in which she could realistically hope to cut into his lead in pledged delegates.

Why contribute to a campaign that can't win?

Uncommitted superdelegates will be asking themselves the same question.

If Ms. Clinton throws everything she has into the next three primaries and comes away with no net advantage, then why swing to her at the convention?

Better to endorse Mr. Obama in May and settle the question.

The news for Ms. Clinton is not entirely bleak.

The departure of Mr. Penn, who was famous for getting into screaming matches with other staffers, will boost morale inside campaign HQ.

She became the first major candidate, yesterday, to call on President George. W. Bush to boycott the Olympic opening ceremony to protest against China's oppression of Tibet.

And the senator will have a chance to change the storyline away from her travails to her stands on issues, today, when General David Petraeus testifies before the Senate foreign relations and armed services committees.

Republican nominee John McCain will use the occasion to urge a continuing occupation of Iraq, while Ms. Clinton and Mr. Obama will highlight their opposition.

Mr. Penn cast Ms. Clinton as the inevitable winner, ignoring the depth of Mr. Obama's organization and fundraising; he portrayed her as the candidate of experience at the time when voters were searching for change; he advised Ms. Clinton to ignore the small states, letting Mr. Obama rack up 11 unanswered wins.

Seen in that light, his departure could be the best thing that ever happened to the Clinton campaign.